It's a shocking result. But, in hindsight, Cameron's victory was seen as an anomaly when he got his majority, so perhaps this is mostly a 'reversion to the mean' ... things are back to normal.

but considering how inaccurate the polls have been lately maybe people should of assumed it be closer ?

if we look back at some recent elections , early polling proved to be highly inaccurate . in Nova Scotia polls gave liberals huge leads but come election day won by very small margin . also have the high profile US election where every poll said Clinton win big , only for her to lose

but I still have a hard time believing the polls were not accurate when she initially called the election , it does seem they tightened for whatever reasons as campaign dragged on

Is anyone running into material that would explain Corbyn's success? He was running 17 points behind when the campaign started.

As for the polling -- nobody does polling in the right way because it's so expensive to get a random sample. The idea is that a random sample gives everyone the same chance of being selected. There used to be telephone books, and pollsters could simply choose people randomly from that It was close enough, but really, they were sampling homes with phones rather than the electorate.

But now that's been blown up. Not only are there cell phones, and people who have two phones, but that aren't rooted to a location. There are also now many phone companies, and no comprehensive telephone list that is a source.

So they sample sub-groups, and then 'construct' their surveys from that. It obviously involves too many assumptions.

LONDON – British Prime Minister Theresa May struck a deal in principle with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party on Saturday to prop up the Conservative government, stripped of its majority in a disastrous election.

The result has demolished May’s political authority, and she has also lost her two top aides, sacrificed in a bid to save their leader from being toppled by a furious Conservative Party.

The moves buy May a temporary reprieve. But the ballot-box humiliation has seriously – and possibly mortally – wounded her leadership just as Britain is about to begin complex exit talks with the European Union.

May’s office said Saturday that the Democratic Unionist Party, which has 10 seats in Parliament, had agreed to a “confidence and supply” arrangement with the government. That means the DUP will back the government on key votes, but it’s not a coalition government or a broader pact.

Downing St. said the Cabinet will discuss the agreement on Monday.

The announcement came after May lost Downing St. chiefs of staff Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, who resigned Saturday. They formed part of May’s small inner circle and were blamed by many Conservatives for the party’s lacklustre campaign and unpopular election platform, which alienated older voters with its plan to take away a winter fuel allowance and make them pay more for long-term care.

In a resignation statement on the Conservative Home website, Timothy conceded that the campaign had failed to communicate “Theresa’s positive plan for the future,” and missed signs of surging support for the opposition Labour Party.

Some senior Tories had made the removal of Hill and Timothy a condition for continuing to support May, who has vowed to remain prime minister. May’s party won 318 seats, 12 fewer than it had before May called a snap election, and eight short of the 326 needed for an outright majority. The main opposition Labour Party surpassed expectations by winning 262.

May announced later that Gavin Barwell – a former housing minister who lost his seat in Thursday’s election – would be her new chief of staff.

May said Barwell would help her “reflect on the election and why it did not deliver the result I hoped for.”

Conservative legislator Nigel Evans said the departure of the two aides was “a start,” but there needed to be changes to the way the government functioned in the wake of the campaign.

He said the Conservative election manifesto – which Hill and Timothy were key in drafting – was “a full assault on the core Tory voters, who are senior citizens.”

“It was a disaster,” he said. “Our manifesto was full of fear and the Labour Party’s manifesto was full of promises.”

Martin Selmayr, senior aide to European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, responded to the resignations by tweeting the word “bauernopfer” – German for the sacrifice of a pawn in chess.

May called the early election when her party was comfortably ahead in the polls, in the hope of increasing her majority and strengthening Britain’s hand in exit talks with the EU.

Instead, the result has sown confusion and division in British ranks, just days before negotiations are due to start on June 19.

May wanted to win explicit backing for her stance on Brexit, which involves leaving the EU’s single market and imposing restrictions on immigration while trying to negotiate free trade deal with the bloc. Some say her failure means the government must now take a more flexible approach to the divorce.

The Times of London said in an editorial that “the election appears to have been, among other things, a rejection of the vague but harshly worded prospectus for Brexit for which Mrs. May sought a mandate.”

It added that “the logic leading to Mrs. May’s departure from Downing St. is remorseless.”

The Downing St. resignations came as May worked to fill jobs in her minority government and replace ministers who lost their seats on Thursday. Her weakened position in the party rules out big changes, and May’s office has said that the most senior Cabinet members – including Treasury chief Philip Hammond, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Amber Rudd – will keep their jobs, but she is expected to shuffle the lower ranks of ministers.

The arrangement with the DUP will make governing easier, but it makes some Conservatives uneasy. The DUP is a socially conservative pro-British Protestant group that opposes abortion and same-sex marriage and once appointed an environment minister who believes human-driven climate change is a myth.

The DUP was founded in the 1970s by the late firebrand preacher Ian Paisley, and in the 1980s was a key player in the “Save Ulster from Sodomy” campaign, which unsuccessfully fought against the legalization of gay sex.

Ruth Davidson, the Conservative leader in Scotland, said she had asked May for assurances that there would be no attack on gay rights after a deal with the DUP.

Northern Ireland is the only part of the U.K. in which same-sex marriage is illegal.

“It’s an issue very close to my heart and one that I wanted categoric assurances from the prime minister on, and I received (them),” said Davidson, who is engaged to be married to her female partner.

DUP Leader Arlene Foster recently denied the party was homophobic.

“I could not care less what people get up to in terms of their sexuality. That’s not a matter for me,” she said. “When it becomes a matter for me is when people try to redefine marriage.”

A deal between the government and the DUP could also unsettle the precarious balance between Northern Ireland’s British loyalist and Irish nationalist parties.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, riding a wave of acclaim for his party’s unexpectedly strong showing, called on May to resign.

Newspaper headlines saw her as just clinging on. “May fights to remain PM,” said the front page of the Daily Telegraph, while the Times of London said: “May stares into the abyss.”

But she seems secure for the immediate future, because senior Conservatives don’t want to plunge the party into a damaging leadership contest.

“I don’t think throwing us into a leadership battle at this moment in time, when we are about to launch into these difficult negotiations, would be in the best interests of the country,” Evans said.

Is anyone running into material that would explain Corbyn's success? He was running 17 points behind when the campaign started.

As for the polling -- nobody does polling in the right way because it's so expensive to get a random sample. The idea is that a random sample gives everyone the same chance of being selected. There used to be telephone books, and pollsters could simply choose people randomly from that It was close enough, but really, they were sampling homes with phones rather than the electorate.

But now that's been blown up. Not only are there cell phones, and people who have two phones, but that aren't rooted to a location. There are also now many phone companies, and no comprehensive telephone list that is a source.

So they sample sub-groups, and then 'construct' their surveys from that. It obviously involves too many assumptions.

its tough to explain even people following the election didn't seem to see it coming , was searching around and the election prediction project did a prediction for the UK and there official guess was

Is anyone running into material that would explain Corbyn's success? He was running 17 points behind when the campaign started.

As for the polling -- nobody does polling in the right way because it's so expensive to get a random sample. The idea is that a random sample gives everyone the same chance of being selected. There used to be telephone books, and pollsters could simply choose people randomly from that It was close enough, but really, they were sampling homes with phones rather than the electorate.

But now that's been blown up. Not only are there cell phones, and people who have two phones, but that aren't rooted to a location. There are also now many phone companies, and no comprehensive telephone list that is a source.

So they sample sub-groups, and then 'construct' their surveys from that. It obviously involves too many assumptions.

its tough to explain even people following the election didn't seem to see it coming , was searching around and the election prediction project did a prediction for the UK and there official guess was

Experienced campaigners were totally misled by conversations with their own voters

Isabel Hardman

Isabel Hardman

17 June 2017

9:00 AM

‘Science,’ wrote Jules Verne, ‘is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.’ Perhaps this is why politics, which claims to be a science, is so littered with tremendous errors at the moment.

It wasn’t just the pollsters and the pundits in Westminster who called this election wrong. People embedded in constituencies couldn’t even correctly predict their own results. These days, politics seems a lot more like alchemy than a real science.

On the night before polling day, a group of Labour MPs compared notes about how things were looking in their patches. It was a miserable conversation in which many were resigned to being dumped by their electorates. Everyone outside a particular metro-politan multi–ethnic bubble reported a hatred of Jeremy Corbyn on the doorstep; hatred of an intensity none of them had seen before. The next day, things still looked bleak. Campaigners knocking on doors in seats such as Wirral South found voters who had once committed to Labour turn around and say they were now off to back the Tories. Meanwhile, Tory MPs with relatively strong majorities were telling one another that their vote was holding up and they couldn’t wait for the whole thing to be over so they could get on with their lives.

None of those Labour MPs who’d told their colleagues they expected to lose did so. And perfectly confident Conservative MPs suddenly found their majorities had disappeared, either to nothing or to just a few votes. In all, 33 Tories lost their seats, and 22 of their colleagues who held on did so by a margin of 1,000 or less.

Normally, after knocking on so many doors, parliamentary candidates get to the end of an election with the most detailed picture possible of what voters want from their party. This time around, far too many MPs had reached the wrong conclusion. The doorstep is sacred ground in politics, yet even experienced campaigners were utterly misled by the conversations that took place on it.

MPs are well-versed in reading between the lines of what voters say. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to vote’, for instance, tends to mean: ‘I’m voting for the other party but because I’m British I’m not going to say it to your face.’ So what did they miss?

‘Looking back,’ says one Labour MP who had spent weeks listening to voters complain about Corbyn, ‘I think for those of us who were hearing “We don’t like Corbyn”, what we didn’t hear was anything about Theresa May. And so we didn’t realise that the silence from the voters meant they didn’t like her either.’ At the start of the campaign, candidates in both parties reported voters describing the Prime Minister as a ‘woman who gets things done’. After the botched manifesto launch, voters just stopped talking about her.

It’s not the first time Labour voters have complained about the party’s leader, either. Andrew Gwynne, Labour’s election campaign chief, confesses that he’d forgotten how unpopular Tony Blair was on the doorstep in 2005. ‘We sometimes feed our own fears on this. If I’m honest, in 2005 when we won I got on the doorstep: “I would vote Labour but not for Tony Blair and what he’s done in Iraq.” We forget that.’ Corbynites also suspect ‘moderate’ Labour MPs were suffering from confirmation bias: only hearing what they already thought about their leader and not looking for evidence that challenged it.

Another mistake both sides seem to have made is turning up on the wrong doorsteps. The Tories managed this spectacularly by focusing on the wrong seats, leaving incumbents to fight alone while parading confidently around the north-east. They also took the Remain vote for granted, forgetting that Theresa May had managed to insult
the 48 per cent who wanted Britain to stay in the European Union by calling them ‘citizens of nowhere’.

Labour MPs were so frightened by what they thought Jeremy Corbyn had done to their party’s appeal that they became obsessed with retaining their existing voters, not looking for new ones. After weeks of phoning this slice of the electorate, which contained some of the most negative attitudes to Corbyn, the candidates started to believe everyone felt this way.

Meanwhile, both parties were neglecting or struggling to reach a group of voters who appear to have turned out in greater numbers than expected to vote Labour: young people. Not just students, but the under-45s, who are more likely to live in blocks of flats which are difficult for canvassers to access, more likely to be out in the evening when parties are canvassing, and are more likely to have housemates or parents who come to the door and suggest a household is voting one way when its younger inhabitants plan to vote another. Some voters had registered so late that the parties just didn’t have any data on them at all. Anyone who has spent much time in politics knows the saying about non-voters — the main thing about them is that they don’t tend to vote. Well, in this election, some of those non-voters turned out for Corbyn, unnoticed by campaigners who thought they knew it all.

How do parties reach these mysterious people? Both parties threw vast sums at Facebook campaigning but are not yet comfortable standing on the virtual doorstep. The Tories spent more than £1 million on attack ads on the site, yet lost seats. Labour strategists argue that what helped them was online posts not written by official propagandists but by campaign groups like Double Down News and Red Labour, which shared viral posts suggesting an establishment conspiracy against Corbyn.

Labour is now considering changing its model of canvassing so it is able to collect much more useful data than the basics needed to help get out the party’s vote on polling day.

Neither Labour nor the Tories won a majority in the election, and both have lessons to learn. But the problem with a science as inexact as politics is that by the time of the next election, the landscape will have changed sufficiently for there to be a whole load more mistakes available to make

( I still feel the corbyn surge was really somewhat of a protest vote and the idea of him as PM isn't really that appealing to a lot of people , labour needs to find a more appealing leader to reach the kind of support they had when Tony Blair PM )

Jeremy Corbyn Tells Labour MPs To Back Him Ahead Of A Possible Second Election

"We must remain in permanent campaign mode on a general election footing," the Labour leader told his MPs in parliament on Tuesday night.

Posted on June 13, 2017, at 2:17 p.m.

Jim Waterson
Jim Waterson
BuzzFeed UK Political Editor

Jeremy Corbyn told the first meeting of Labour MPs following the general election that he needed their unity ahead of a possible second election as Theresa May’s government “has no mandate and no legitimacy”.

"Now the election is over, the next phase of our campaign to win power for the majority has already begun," he told MPs. "We must remain in permanent campaign mode on a general election footing."

He went on: "We achieved what we did last Thursday because we were a united party during the campaign and we need to maintain that unity and collective discipline in the weeks and months ahead."

Labour MPs, who have previously been critical of the leader, now seem increasingly united behind the man who beat expectations to lead Labour to win 40% of the vote in last week's general election, despite the party falling short of the seats required to form a government.

"In 2010 and 2015 we came back feeling like shit," said one Labour MP after leaving the sweltering meeting room in the House of Commons. "This time around we've come back and seen the Tories' faces."

Another prominent Labour MP, who has been highly critical of Corbyn, said the atmosphere was "brilliant" and "government is the aim".

For almost two years the parliamentary Labour party meetings became a ritual where Corbyn would face criticism and abuse from a largely hostile group of MPs and peers. Journalists standing outside the room, waiting to hear what was said, often heard deathly silences for much of the meetings.

On Tuesday evening all that could be heard from the room was a constant stream of cheers and laughter, as Labour MPs from all wings of the party embraced what they felt was a glorious electoral defeat against the odds.

Corbyn told MPs he would keep the party on a permanent election footing and would continue to campaign around the country in the Conservative marginals the party needs to win in order to form a majority government.

The prospects of an immediate second general election have receded, however, with the Conservatives in Downing Street working on forming a minority government with the help of Northern Ireland's DUP.

"We are now a government in waiting and we must think and act at all times with that in mind," said Corbyn. "That is our responsibility to the huge numbers who voted for our manifesto last week: a programme to transform Britain for the many that caught the imagination of millions.

"This was a remarkable result achieved because we stayed united and worked as a team and I have no doubt together we can win the next general election, whenever that may be."

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